From indie pioneers Zen Studios (makers of Pinball FX2 and CastleStorm) comes KickBeat, an innovative rhythm game with a Kung Fu theme, featuring fully 3D characters and high-energy music! You can use your own music to create custom KickBeat tracks, allowing you ultimate replayability!

Recommended By Curators

Includes songs from Electronic Super Joy

Six exclusive tracks from the Electronic Super Joy OST, by indie electronic artist enV, have been added to the single player campaign. If you enjoyed the Kickbeat soundtrack, be sure to check out Electronic Super Joy, by Michael Todd Games.

About This Game

From indie pioneers Zen Studios (makers of Pinball FX2 and CastleStorm) comes KickBeat, an innovative rhythm game with a Kung Fu theme, featuring fully 3D characters and high-energy music! You can use your own music to create custom KickBeat tracks, allowing you ultimate replayability!

New Additions for KickBeat Steam Edition:

Six exclusive tracks from the Electronic Super Joy OST by indie electronic artist enV have been added to the single player campaign. There are now 24 tracks in the campaign!

Advanced difficulty is now available in Free Play

Beat Your Music mode is available much earlier in the campaign, allowing you to create your own custom tracks without having to complete the single player campaign

Adjustments have been made to the difficulty progression, helping players adjust to higher levels of play on a better curve

Enhanced graphics

Customizable keyboard controls + full X input controller support.

42 Steam Achievements

Stream Trading Cards

Steam Cloud Support

The KickBeat Steam Edition Soundtrack features tracks from a diverse lineup of artists from well known bands such as Pendulum and Marilyn Manson, to indie musicians Celldweller and Blue Stahli, to hidden talents like electronic music producer Voicians and Taiwanese rapper Shen Yi.

Beat Your Music mode features a set of tools allowing players to use their own music to create custom KickBeat tracks. Experiment with different types of music to create different types of fights!

We got rid of the bars, arrows, button icons, etc. that other music games rely on as action cues and replaced them with fully 3D animated characters. Instead of just seeing characters in the background moving to a preset script as eye candy while the actual gameplay takes place in an abstract 2D interface, you actually control and react to those 3D characters. That means you actually get to focus your attention on what those characters are doing! As you play the game, you're creating your own fight sequence with your button presses. We also let you get rid of all the other interface parts (such as score) if you like, so that there are no distractions from the action.

KickBeat features a full length single player campaign with beautifully hand drawn animations and a unique art style.

Media Quotes

“KickBeat succeeds as both a rhythm game and a fighting one” – JoyStiq

KickBeat is a rhythm game that's almost good, but doesn't quite hit the mark.

For starters there are only 24 tracks, and they're pretty much all either what wikipedia defines as 'Industrial Rock'/'NuMetal' or the 6 electronica/dance tracks from Electronic Super Joy. This ultimately leads to a pretty low amount of genres. There is an option to make custom tracks out of your own songs, and while you can set the BPM, you cannot add true custom tracking as far as I can tell, leading to a sub-par experience there.

As many other reviews have noted, the notes don't really match up with the rhythm that much, so you will primarily be relying on the visuals to know when to press buttons. This leads into another large flaw of the game - the visuals are incredibly noisy, often making it a strain to know when the 'enemies' are coming.

Another mechanical quirk of the game are the 'power up' orbs. These primarily just give you bonus points or multipliers. There's also a shockwave (clears nearby enemies) and a shield, but using those actually grants less points than not using them. The quirk is that you have to doubletap the button in order to pickup the orb. On the higher difficulties, missing an orb counts as getting hit. This is problematic because it can quickly grow incredibly tiresome to doubletap orb wielding enemies in succession.

The game was initially designed for consoles - as such I used a controller for it, but that brought its own slew of problems. On expert/master difficulty, there are often enemies coming from three directions. As almost anyone who plays on a controller is aware of, pressing an opposing pair of buttons (example: A+Y or X+B) on a controller is incredibly awkward. Combine this with needing to doubletap, and getting punished for hitting extra buttons, leads to a frustrating setup. I imagine this is much easier with a keyboard, but it does raise the question of why the game was designed this way to begin with since it initially launched on console.

Finally, I just wanted to point out the silly unlock system the game uses. You're stuck with playing as the male character until you complete the game's story as him - then you can use the female. Despite being given seperate 'stories' they both play the exact same songs, and have the same gameplay.

Oh - right, this game actually has a story. It's, as to be expected, absurdly terrible. This isn't a problem in itself, except for the fact that there are a couple brief unskippable cutscene parts associated with the 'boss battles' which are painful to sit through.

Anyway, despite all my whining, I did finish the game - which is saying something in itself. There is potential here, and if you picked this up in a bundle, it's worth giving a whirl. Ultimately however, I cannot recommend actually buying this game by itself.

Wow I really don't get the naysayers... maybe some people have sync issues? It seems perfectly synced to me, once I got into it I got lots of perfects. Yes, it's not all on the beat but it even tells you this during the tutorial/training, it's not exclusively using the drumbeats, it's more about the feel of the song I'd say. I got it in the humble bundle as well and didn't expect too much of it, but I have to say it's really fun. It seems really hard at first, but I got the hang of it in my first hour of playing and it feels awesome when you do get it and start pummeling strings of baddies in a row. I can't play it too long at once though, playing on a keyboard works fine but after a little over an hour my hand starts aching. It's a great game for a few quick rounds though, and the advantage over something like guitar hero seems to be that the action continues very quickly, 10 seconds or so after a song ends a new one can be starting if you want.

this game reminds me of the Keep the beat like games like Parapa the rappa back on the PS1 ah good times any way this game ROCKS the story is decent with nice art work the gameplay is solid with flashy graphics and simple and easy to understand controls and the Music just so Awesome

HOWEVER this game has a rather high difficulty curve and the turtoral won't really help out much as this game has very fast pace gameplay

and sadly it has some rather nasty Bugs one being and this is also a Recomendation to players DISABLE the Steam Overlay for this game unless you like the frame rate to drop every time you get an achevment

and i also like to say something about the mode not fetured in other versions of this game the game mode where you can make your own stages up to me this is what i would call an expiermental add on simply due to the fact it would never ever reach the same qauality as the games main playlist

but all in all if you like to kick some minion butt to the sounds of music this game is SO for you

plus it has Massive Replay value

Ups

graphicsstorygameplaysoundtrackreplay value rewards

mehs

leader boardexpiremental game mode

bads

steam overlay bugno multi player game moderather high difficulti curve

final verdict

an awsome keep the beat Kung-Fu game if you like Gitar Hero or some other kind of keep the beat play style games this is on i highly recomdend for you

It's a rhythm based game that doesn't follow the rhythm very well. Sometimes it will do the drum beat, sometimes it will do the guitar beat. Sometimes it will throw the enemies faster, sometimes slower(during the same sequence).

Combine this with changing enemy positions meaning the same beat/riff/whatever changes required keys to press, add horrible camera placement, and you've got a recipe for a game that you will play for 40 minutes and get frustrated with it

This is just a ton of fun, and I don't know how I had never heard of it. KickBeat is a DDR-style rhythm game with a holistic sensibility about the beat, jumping among drums, guitar, and vocals as they become prominent in the song. It doesn't feel like you're playing the drums with your keyboard; it feels like you're conducting the whole song. The mapping of the built-in songs is precise and joyful. The songs themselves are way more industrial-metal than I usually prefer, but in this game they work perfectly, and you'll agree with me even if it's not your genre.

Apart from gameplay, one thing that really stands out is the unexpectedly hilarious writing of the cutscenes. Honest belly laughs. It's baffling how writers with such good instincts could name their game KickBeat, possibly the most forgettable name for a video game I can think of, right up there with the equally underappreciated Defender's Quest.

The upper difficulty levels sometimes require three simultaneous button presses, and some keyboards -- including both of mine -- have an issue with "ghosting" that prevents them from registering all three. This is not a game bug, it's a hardware bug, but it's still something to be aware of before you buy. The lower difficulty levels are still plenty satisfying and offer lots of replayability.

Full-throated recommendation. This game deserved press and didn't get it.

This game concept is cool and new to me, kung fu fighting with rhythm game.... hmph. However as soon as you start playing, you find more and more interesting thing in the game like eh? you could use your own music for game. yeah use your own music, there is no time restriction or watever so you could just literally run a 10 hour song and play non-stop. But the beat for your own song doesn't fit correctly sometimes, the rhythm that is, but it is still satistifying. overall? Good. Shall U grab it? Probally during sales and if You are an Rhythm game fan. e.g OSU,Audition,Mstar.

Got this game in a Bundle and it seemed pretty nice so I downloaded it straight away... would be a nice rhythm/music game... If it followed the beat... Beat is all over the place, not good for a rhythm game (and yes, I tried adjusting the latency in the menu), beat is erratic, sometimes cleary off, enemies don't follow the music at all... you could play this game without music and it would be easier...

Subjective review content - half of the music is really awful screamo-industrial garbage. Especially Celldweller and Blue Stahli.Objective review content - really really wants to make sure I know what's on my desktop every few minutes.

Zen Studios makes games based on things they've heard of but never played. "Rhythm games...oh yeah, that thing where you press buttons in time to music, right?" No sense of beat, timing, or why they don't use crazy dynamic camera angles to hide the notes from you. For a game with so little going on visually, it's really prone to framerate drops, which only further enhance the inconsistent timings with enemy attack animations and the difficulty in seeing where attacks are coming from. It seems like Zen spent all their time trying to make it look cool and forgot to build the game under it.

It's sort of like how Zen thinks pinballs make a plastic "clack" sound on a table. Sort of like how Pinball FX2 is almost a good game but can't quite make it. It's just a little off in all the wrong ways.

I really like the concept of the game as being combination of fighting and rhytm genres. The music selection is pretty cool (despite of these ♥♥♥♥♥♥ enV tracks). I also liked the kung-fu cartonish style with fun to watch animations. However, the gameplay itself is pretty bad - most of the time music is badly synced with coresponding buttons. What is more, there are many situations in which you can't even see the buttons as enemies block your view of arena. It is not a complete crap (actually fun to some extend), but it is hard to recommend. I wish the the gameplay mechanics were better implemented.

Pretty clunky feeling in all honesty. It looked like a cool concept to begin with (and the graphics are quite well executed), but for a rhythm game the rhythm keeping is hit and miss a lot of the time. It states that on harder difficulties (which is every difficulty but easy) that the rhythm swaps between drum beat, intruments and off beat vocals; which they claim is to increase diffculty. I just think it's imperfect beat recognition. This isn't a problem if you want to play on easy all the times or you like this kind of thing, but I'm not a fan.

Ok, first comes first, I suggest to go straight to the hardest difficulty, since that's the only one where I can actually recognize the rhythm; it's a mid-range challenge, so if you feel you are very good but not particularly exceptional at this kind of games it should be up your alley.Would have preferred a bigger song selection and some extra way to interact, but I really liked the idea to add some cinematic feeling to the gameplay, especially when coupled with the right amount of cheesiness; I also extremely enjoyed the double tap mechanism, that allows the player to ignore bonuses while getting used to the game and stepping up the challenge by collecting them when he feels confident enough afterwards.

You like music and Mortal Kombat? Well this game gives you a chance to beat your own music while challenging your gamepad skills.

If you are a type of an eclectic audiophile who like good music and gaming then KickBeat is for you. I would also recommend using gamepad for this game cos using the keyboard may turn ugly at some stage, just as trying to walk straight after two bottles of vodka.The game has a very nice visual layout and graphics. It also offers you several game mods. Of course there is a story mode based on a cliché love story and some good mix or rock and hip-hop. There is a free roam mode and most fun "Beat your Music" mode (warning if you are a Skrillex fan you may want to have a spare gamepad or two).Overall the game is definitely a joy to play and also helps you develop some basic attention and reaction skills. Oh try Fur Elise in this game, ♥♥♥ kicking implement in a Beethoven music is somewhat of an exquisite joy.

This game has quickly become one of my favourite games, easy to learn and enjoy, can be a tad tricky but that comes with what a should do is to pose a challenge, and it does just that, and the integration of your own music just adds to that enjoyment I must say.

This game is both visually pleasing and challenging. I love the gameplay and concept.For all the people who can't stop crying about their game not being in sync with music, please consider going to the Options and adjusting the Lag Settings in Audio Settings.

It was the frist game i played inside this kind of games, but i can say i loved it. The gameplay i hard at the beggneing, but when you get the hand of it you will actually enjoy this game. A lot.It comes with Story Mod, which is also pretty cool, with two different playable Character (another 2 that later you'll unlock by getting all the stars), but the songs and enviroments on the story of each character are the same, so there isn't much diversity in that.The beat your own music freature is a good concept, but needs to be developed a little bit more. It's confusing and we can't customize our songs to looks as good as the ones that came with the game.The more you progress and win more stars on each track on different difficultys, you'll unlock rewards, which mainly are skins for the playable character.